Sunday Walk at Dusk

I walk back from the asphalt of the school playground

where I picked up a piece of wood

in the shape of a tree thought

blown from above in the wind

of  two nights ago.

I walk along the sidewalk home thinking

someone might mistake this branch for a gun

in the headlight glare.

so I carry it loosely swinging by two fingers

pointing the delicate web of lichen into the headlight

to reflect pale green above the gray silver bark.

maybe they see me and think

about the darkness that I am not.

maybe they only see me vaguely with no comprehension

simply a blank silhouette against the dark shadow trees

and the sky holding the last of the day’s blue around the edges of

oncoming clouds.

Maybe they see me and think.

 

 

 

I don’t do enough walking at night. It is strange how it makes me feel younger, a little adventurous, but not in danger.  My mind opens up in different ways when I walk in the dark. I become much less a visual creature and stretch out more with my thoughts, trusting my feet to fall right.

Before my walk I was feeling a bit harassed by thoughts of things I wanted to get done before my weekend comes to a close. Now I feel calmly ready to get what I can done. And I will let tomorrow take care of itself.

“Auschwitz is not only behind us.”

“Auschwitz must be comprehended in the context of its historical past, be recognized when it happens in the present, and not be ruled out blindly for the future.”

Gunter Grass  “A Father’s Difficulties in Explaining Auschwitz to His Children”

“My children have their doubts. They say: You don’t believe in anything anyway. I admit to my unbelieving life, and tell them: As soon as belief gets ahead of reason you can count on the demise of both politics and literature. Examples include the belief in one God, the belief in Germany, and the belief in true Socialism.”

Gunter Grass “Literature and Politics”

I have been reading a lot about the early part of the 20th century in Germany and the events and effects of what occurred then and there.

W. H. Sebald “The Emmegrants”, Ursula Hegi “Stones from the River”, Gunter Grass “The Tin Drum”, Roberto Belano “2666″, and a graphic novel “Berlin”, as well as many works by Kafka have been giving me some understanding of the enmeshing social and cultural atmosphere that produced the horror that was Auschwitz and the whole nightmare of the Holocaust and the insuing costs that left scars on the world.

Fear is the common thread that weaves this tapestry of doom. Fear disseminated by people who want to control the destiny of a nation and use it to hypnotize people and by degrees convince them to accept inhumanity as the only appropriate measure to protect their way of life.

Every time Dick Cheney or Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck speaks about what we should fear and why we must act on those fears. I am thankful that we have for the moment pushed them to side to focus on some of the pressing issues that face us as a nation. When they use the examples of Hitler and the Third Reich to paint the current political situation in blackest most fearful terms, they are actually using the methodology of the Nazi’s. I think we should fear unreasonable, unsubstantiated  fear and single minded devotion to blind faith in anything. Let’s think things through and look for evidence. Let’s keep our eyes and minds open to posibilities and continue to fill the air with our dreams for a world full of people who can discuss and celebrate differences without the shadow of unreasonable fear. Then Auswitz will be behind us, as well as Rawanda, and Vietnam, and Iraq, and Afghanistan and torture for freedom’s sake.

We do have a long way to go before we are far enough ahead of this thing that it can’t creep up and bite us in the ass again. Maybe we need better rearview mirrors, or maybe take turns looking out, but we have to know what the thing looks like in order to avoid it. When we are looking for a high-stepping, swastika resplendant mob it might sneak up on us in the form of some nice people concerned about morals, or anti-terrorist legislation to keep us safe. Your favorite relatives and best friends could be involved. That is how it gets in when we are afraid to disagree with nice people about their bad ideas and unreasonable fears. Fear is the monster that closes the mind to humanity: careful listening, respectful conversation, and diligent open-minded inquiry are the weapons that will slay it. These are the things that keep us  from reliving the horror of Auschwitz.

Summer Teaching and a Great Book

Summer Teaching

I have started full time at my summer job of keeping my little friends busy and safe. All I have to do is pay attention and go with their flow, and all is well. No paper work just being there for children and providing what they need. They have decided that Dr. Suess is great and have me reading the story of the pale green pants with no one inside them every day. We also have a great box project going, where each has their own special box and I provide materials for them to decorate it. There is one that has his moments, but I am definitely reaching him already after just one week so I feel pretty solid. So many calm moments of children just being and doing what is natural to them — learning about their world. Why do teachers think we have to interfere so much in children’s lives? Curriculum, I don’t need no stinking curriculum. I just need to pay attention and have a few ideas and some interesting materials. The children do the rest.

Short and Vague Review: 2666 by Roberto Bolano

I just finished a facinating novel by Roberto Bolano translated from Spanish, called “2666.” It is about so much that I could not tell you what it is about. It is written in the form of 5 novelas with vague connections to each other, some stronger than others. In the end I got the feeling that somewhere out in the future it all makes more sense, or maybe not. It is not very important. Like any good novel, for me, it was living a life in another skin, or experiencing the world from a slightly shifted dimension. I come back a little changed with a fuller understanding of life as a human being. Also I feel a little disoriented, like I only got some of what he was saying and maybe some of what he said by accident. I think the really good writers are not able to know all the levels contained in their work. There are shadows and reflections that are cast that they are not able to see. There are so many combinations of characters and symbols that interact with the reader that they cannot know what chimeras will hatch. I always come out of novels like this as if I have gone to a foreign country and my mind has not yet assimilated all of the strangeness and time of a different land. That is how I know it was a well written piece. It shifts my perspective and I see more of the human experience. The scope of what I have read has to linger because I am unable to process the whole experience on a conscious level. I am sure that bits of this novel will resurface in poems and dreams for a long while to come.

A Poem on a Magazine Headline And 2 Preschool Classroom Notes

Hot Vampires in Love

The TV Guide shouted

above the conveyor

carrying my groceries

to the supermarket checker.

Suddenly I missed

Warren Zevon.

Only he could write this song.

Note #1:  On Teasing

I had a large group of very active boys for the last two years. There has been a lot of teasing and a lot of lost tempers. The thing I finally hit upon with them was to talk with the 5 boys who were doing most of the teasing (They also were the ones most sensitive to it of course). Together we came to a pretty good definition of teasing and a signal I or other children could do to alert the teaser to his behavior. We decided on simply saying the word “Teasing” with our “no thank you” sign which is sign language for “no”. Within 3 weeks the worst offenders had reduced their behavior by 3/4 and we had very few temper outburst. I did most of the alerting, and I did it very matter-of-factly with no judgment, or as little as I could manage. One boy who was the worst offender almost completely stopped teasing behavior within 2 weeks of the start of our experiment.It so important to give children immediate feedback (especially with children under 5) without interrupting their flow or making them feel badly.

Note #2: On Exploring Emotions and Feelings

Emotion coaching is one of the only effective tools that a preschool teacher has to use when teaching children how to successfully integrate into a group and learn social skills. I think that teachers should be thoroughly trained to be sensitive, and use this in mostly one on one situations. Why would we as educators talk about water, sand, or kangaroos and not about feelings? We should explore feelings as freely as we explore butterflies or mud puddles. That way they may be less scary and more easy to manage.
Now if a child starts to disclose abuse or shows signs of emotional distress, of course you cut the activity short and check on the child as well as talking with the parent to report what happened and see if you can give more support to the child around whatever issues came up. In my experience parents often are relieved to have a sensitive teacher who is willing to give extra support to a child who is experiencing a crisis as long as you support the parent as well.

A Failed Experiment: A New Plan

I started out this week intent on focusing on the light and got lost in a dense gray fog of fatigue and indifference ending in a black funk. I have no idea how things happen this way. This all ended with my lovely Mary telling me I had to make a plan for what I was going to do with my life because this isn’t working for anyone. She is, as usual, right, but making long range plans is not one of things I have never been good at. I tend to just take life as it comes, and living out a scripted plan makes me feel like I am on the gray road to the end without surprises or bright spontaneus  flowers of inspiration that bloom by accident on a less planned route. But then I have been thinking that maybe by not planning I have looked at all the possible roads and have spontaneusly moved myself down smaller and smaller roads until I have run up against this dead end. Maybe if I look at a larger map, I can plan a route with the option of taking unplanned turns.

I need to pull back my perspective so I can see the options available to me. For five years I have been working with people myopically focussed on what they can objectively quantify. I know that this is not the only approach to education or life. I have experienced places and people who are not confined to the clinical academic roads that trap life into boxes of jargon and numbers. I need to find a community based on ever opening vistas of human experience and creativity. I need to make a plan that opens out into broad roadless fields and rugged wilderness of unknown adventures. Maybe my plan will be to construct an offroad vehicle that will take me to places I haven’t been before. I have little bits of my mind that I can spare from my work and class focussed brain,  busily nibbling away, gathering bits and pieces, with mouselike energy constructing a plan for such a vehicle. I see the progress in my dreams and my attitude. Today I am full of hope even though I still have to face the almost overwhelming wall of small thinking each day. I have the power of creativity, synthesis, poetry, and the magic language of dreams working tirelessly to make a me sized hole in that wall. I will see the light of a new life of my own making.

What can I do now? That is the question at this point. I can write each day, which I didn’t last week. Writing frames my world in possibilities and allows me to exorcise my dark demons of despair. I need to put ideas into words every day that will at least save a little bit of my sanity until I can devote more time to my escape plan. It keeps the door open just a crack so the light can leak in. It is really impossible to get any quality work done in the dark.